July 9, 2015

Monday marks the beginning of the 13th annual Open and User Innovation Society meeting (née OUI Workshop née UOI Workshop née UI workshop). After alternating between Boston and the Germanic language portions of Europe from 2003 to 2011, the conference detoured west (to England) in 2013 and this year south to Portugal. The conference is hosted by Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

As in recent years, the conference runs 2 1/2 days, and the sessions alternate between invited plenary keynotes and parallel paper sessions. The latter include 3-4 full-length talks and 2-minute minitalks. A new addition is a three-hour doctoral consortium on Wednesday.

The topics for the 14 paper sessions are:

Crowdsourcing (2)

Crowdfunding & entrepreneurship (2)

Leadership and organization (2)

Policy (2)

Communities (1)

Firm interactions with users (1)

Healthcare UI (1)

User toolkits (1)

Other UI (2)

This year, there is not an explicitly “open innovation” track but the policy and leadership tracks nominally include it; glancing at the paper topics, the conference has the least OI focus of any conference since 2008 explicitly invited OI work. (OTOH, much of OI nowadays is crowdsourcing — and with 7 full papers and 8 minitalks the topic will be well-covered).

As in previous years, attendance appears to be less for the European venues than in Boston — making for a more intimate and interactive conference. Unfortunately, I’ll be one of those missing this year, due to an unanticipated schedule conflict. One of my co-authors will be presenting our work on 3D printing in the final session.

This is my first year missing OUI since I started attending: from 2008-2014 I made 7 of 7 OUI conferences vs. 4 of 7 AOM. (In fact, the only reason I decided to attend AOM this year is because I’m missing OUI). I always value my time at OUI, hearing the newest research, having a chance to discuss my own research, and of course meeting old and new friends. (I’ve lost track of how many new colleagues I first got to know at OUI).

Best wishes to all my OUI friends and (to quote our local sports team) just wait until 2016!